In terms of talking with my collaborators as they came onboard - Jeannine Oppewall, our production designer, Dante Spinotti, our cinematographer, and so forth - I said to them, "Let's pretend that this is a place like Honolulu. Let's ignore the fact that all these other movies have been made here for decades and try to come at it with a fresh eye, as if it were an exotic city that people aren't that familiar with. And let's present our own view of it, create a world that's unique to this movie [L.A Confidential].

Even though L.A Confidential box-office was a fraction of, say, Titanic or the Grinch movie, it finds its audience and will continue doing so for who knows how long, because of the basic thing we love about movies, which is storytelling and performances.

I had the great fortune to actually become friends with Sam [Fuller] and ultimately collaborate with him on White Dog, which we wrote together.

Roger [Corman] didn't actually hire me, though. I was hired by AIP [American International Pictures], the studio that made the picture, which was Sam Arkoff and Jim Nicholson. It was a great learning experience for me, because not only did I work on the script, but they hired me back to go on location when they were making the movie, to write new scenes and so forth.

That's what I love about Michael Douglas' performance in Wonder Boys, because I feel like he surprises audiences that know him from very different roles in his other work.

I had a checkered early career, for sure, with a lot of very unhappy experiences where pictures got taken away, re-cut, re-titled... all the nightmares one hears about.

Pittsburgh has this rich industrial past, when it was the heart of the U.S. steel industry, and it burned out as the industry burned out and moved elsewhere.